Japan

Japan is reportedly eyeing a return to the top of the supercomputer ranks. The county’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry plans to spend 19.5 billion yen ($173 million) on a new supercomputer, according to budget filings reported by Reuters, with aims of developing a machine capable of 130 petaflops.
That number would put the company in the top spot, moving the AI Bridging… Read More

Early stage venture firm, Draper Nexus, has closed its second fund at $175 million, according to Managing Director Q Motiwala. Its debut fund closed in 2013, at $50 million.
Limited partners in Draper Nexus are global tech conglomerates, primarily based in Japan.
For its second fund, the firm signed up about 20 LP’s including Panasonic, Hitachi, Kyocera, Shimizu, NEC, Canon and others. Read More

Apple is on a research & development spree! The company has announced a bunch of new R&D centers over the past few months, and R&D spendings have skyrocketed. This time, Apple CEO Tim Cook announced that the company plans to open a new center in Japan during a visit in Tokyo, according to Xinhua.
This isn’t the first time we’re hearing about a new R&D center in Japan. Read More

Stripe, the company that lets app publishers, online merchants and other digital businesses include payments features via a few lines of code, is expanding in Asia. After launching in Singapore two weeks ago, the startup is now officially opening for business in Japan. And alongside the Japan launch, Stripe is announcing a new investor. Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company, the largest credit… Read More

Afters years of waiting, Spotify has finally launched its music streaming service in Japan. We reported earlier this month that the launch would happen before September is out, and the company just about delivered on that timeframe. Read More

I spent a week in Tokyo last month as a speaker at the CEDEC gaming conference. Had you asked 10 year old me about Japan, I would have conjured up images of Godzilla, Dragon Ball Z, and ninjas. Funnily enough, day trips to Akihabara and Harajuku brought some of these to life through arcades, cosplayers, and stores full of manga collectibles. Walking around Tokyo, I saw virtual reality poised… Read More

After more than a year of hinting, Spotify is finally coming to Japan this month. The Swedish music streaming service will go live in the country before the end of September, a source at the company confirmed to TechCrunch. Read More

There may be a debate about whether we’ve reached peak Pokémon Go for gamers, but the hit title is just getting started with brands. That’s because Japanese mobile operator SoftBank is the latest company to sign up to be a “sponsored location” inside the game. Read More

Latest Crunch Report

Sony posted a slim ¥21.2 billion ($205 million) profit for its Q1 2016. That’s down on the ¥82.4 billion profit it carded this time last year, but in general the quarter was a mixed bag of positives and negatives following the impact of cost-cutting initiatives. Read More

It’s finally here folks, Nintendo’s quarterly earnings day has never been so anticipated. But the Pokémon phenomenon hasn’t translated into success for the games giant, which carded a $49 million loss (5.13 billion yen) for Q1 2016. Revenue came in at $587 million (62 billion yen), 30 percent lower than Q1 2105. Read More

Pokémon Go has finally launched in Japan, the land where Pokémania first began. McDonalds is the game’s first sponsor in a deal which, as we reported earlier this week, turns the fast food firm’s 3,000 stores in the country into Pokémon Go “gyms”. Read More

Line, the mobile messaging app from Japan, is going public today in a dual Japan-U.S. IPO that is set to be the largest of a tech company this year to date. Yet, despite that, precious little is known about the company outside of Asia, where the vast majority of its users are located. Read More

Coinbase, one of the world’s largest bitcoin companies, has set its sights on Japan after landing funding from a range of Japanese investors, including one firm that helped Twitter set up shop in the country. Read More